One advantage of portability offered by laptop-size personal computers is that the programs and files of another computer at a remote location can be accessed and used through dial-up over a public network. This advantage is offset by the work involved in carrying and safeguarding the instrument during travel. Additionally, traveling users needing to communicate with a remote computer still experience problems in locating suitable telephone jacks for connection of their portable computer to a public network.
On the other hand, telephone terminals are widely available and presently provide a way for a user to access at least some of the functionalities of a remotely-located computer. Remotely accessing a personal computer's application program capability, including specifically word processing, spreadsheet and email is dependent, however, on the user being able to enter quickly and easily all necessary commands to open and use the programs without benefit of a monitor display of command icons and menus; and to forward the results to any selected destination.
Current conversant system products provide voice and word recognition/response capabilities. These include the capability to converse in voice mode with a caller, to recognize a caller's spoken response to voice prompts, and to react to the response by taking various actions such as to record a voice mail message. The systems also include the capability to convert voice to text and text to voice; and to compare voiceprints. One such conversant system, available from Lucent Technologies Inc., is the INTUITY.TM. CONVERSANT.RTM. product. Examples of applications which this product supports include: order entry; pay-for-service; automating of common business functions such as auto attendant, bulletin board and form filler; automated information collection; graphical speech editing which enables the cutting and pasting of speech files; automated voice-directed incoming call routing; voice-activated call answering; voice mail; and more. These applications are contained in software which can be added to existing communications systems such as a PBX through an add-on "voice card", and in other ways. However, the commands in the current conversant system applications are usually very application-specific; and thus they typically limit the remote user's voice entry choices to functions contained in the application.
Many current conversant systems applications use text-to-voice and voice-to-text conversions. Some applications give flexibility to a remote user to select options without having to hear or go through an entire menu of choices. However, the functions that, for example, a conventional word processor provides, such as text editing, text formatting and user-defined routing, are not available on existing conversant system applications to provide user-friendly remote operation form a telephone terminal. The open-ended, user-controlled command structure needed to remotely operate a word processor or a spreadsheet on a personal computer and to forward files to a destination with remote command, has been lacking in the conversant systems art.
Products are also available which enable a user to locally invoke the edit function of a word processor in a personal computer. The user turns on the personal computer, issues a voiced command to the computer's microphone to "OPEN WORD PROCESSOR", and through further specified voiced commands dictates text and saves the dictation as a text file. An example of a personal computer software product which recognizes and creates general text from normal speech is Dragon Naturally Speaking.RTM., available from Dragon Systems at website www.dragonsys.com. The Kurzweil VoicePLUS 2.5 as described in their product brochure is a similar product which also allows voice operation of spreadsheet, database and email applications. The voice commands of these products are issued locally at the personal computer.
Other systems have existed for some years which allow users to call up their computer and voice-prompt it to read E-mail. A recent such product was described in an article "Computer, Take a Letter" on the CNN website (www.cnnfn.com/digitaljam/9701/06). Remote use of the application programs of a personal computer for a telephone terminal, however, requires among other things a convenient command structure which allows user flexibility in the entering and sequencing of the commands. Remote use from a telephone terminal also requires security protocols and routines to, for example, forward files by remote command, which are specific to such remote access and usage. Such security protocols and routines to date have remained largely undeveloped.